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An Island Vineyard, the Hard Way

THE CROP The Rusack Winery vineyard, high above the Pacific on Santa Catalina Island.Credit
Brian P. Hall for The New York Times

AVALON, Calif.

IT may be among the world’s most challenging vineyards, with salty soil and over-the-top costs for transporting the grapes to the winery. Then there are the predators: crickets and yellow jackets and deer and bison. And disease, like the powdery mildew that once forced each cluster of chardonnay grapes to be washed by hand.

But the worst is the wind: sea breezes that forced the vines to be covered in plastic sheets so potential grapes didn’t blow off.

This is the dream vineyard of Geoff Rusack, a Santa Monica, Calif., aviation lawyer turned Santa Ynez Valley vintner, who imported the zinfandel vines of a dreamer before him to grow grapes on Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off Los Angeles’s coast.

The family of Mr. Rusack’s wife, Alison — the Wrigleys of chewing gum and Chicago Cubs fame — has owned land on Catalina for nearly a century. The dream of an island vineyard took hold while the couple were riding horses there during their second date, in 1982. Twenty-five years later, Mr. Rusack realized the dream by transplanting the remaining zinfandel vines of Justinian Caire, a San Francisco businessman who brought the grapes to Santa Cruz Island in 1884.

Mr. Caire built a red brick winery that stands today and turned Santa Cruz, a remote and rugged isle off the coast of Santa Barbara, into one of the West Coast’s more celebrated vineyards before it was knocked out in 1932 by the one-two punch of Prohibition and the Great Depression.

Mr. Rusack, who founded the Rusack Winery in Santa Barbara County in 1995, took Mr. Caire’s zinfandel, as well as pinot noir and chardonnay vines, and planted them on four acres of the family’s El Rancho Escondido, which sits beneath Santa Catalina Island’s mountaintop airport and overlooks the western coastline.

“We just said, ‘We’re not getting any younger,’ ” he said. “It’s like the Nike ads: Just do it.”

Mrs. Wrigley Rusack added: “We’d be kicking ourselves if we didn’t try this. We’d always wonder if it would have worked.”

It does, barely, despite geography and climate. Yellow jackets wiped out half the first zinfandel crop. The wasps did not return over the summer, but quail and foxes ate about half the pinot noir crop, which was harvested the first week of September.

“It was a great thing to get to know the vineyard business in Santa Ynez before we attacked Catalina,” Mr. Rusack said. “We call it extreme farming. Being in this environment, you have to be vigilant. You have to be on top of it. All of the different things we have to do to dial this in are unique to Catalina.”

The owners of Santa Cruz Island — the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy — were happy to let the old vines go. They have spent the last three decades trying to return the 97-square-mile island to its native environment, removing feral pigs and sheep, and returning bald eagles and island foxes. But while preserving cultural history is a small part of the conservancy’s mission, replanting a long-lost vineyard of nonnative fruit was never in the cards, despite pleas from donors.

“It just wasn’t appropriate for us to do it on Santa Cruz Island,” said Lotus Vermeer, who was director of the Nature Conservancy’s Channel Islands Program from 2002 until last April. The group didn’t have the funds, resources or expertise, she said. “Geoff and Alison really took the pressure off of us to plant a vineyard there, and they did it right.”

That process started in earnest about a decade ago, when Mr. Rusack began researching Catalina’s climate and found it was much like the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County, where chardonnay and pinot prosper. After hearing about the remnants of the old Santa Cruz vineyard, he said he thought: “You know what would be novel and fun and historical? Why don’t we try to resurrect some of these wild vines on Catalina Island?”

Photo

A box containing the first harvest.Credit
Brian P. Hall for The New York Times

Soon after, he was led to one of the last surviving vines on Santa Cruz by David Dewey, the ranch manager, who said he “fished around” until finding grapes growing in a willow on a hillside choked by scrub oak, poison oak and lemonade berry. With his two sons’ help, Mr. Rusack collected samples and had them identified as zinfandel by experts at the University of California, Davis. Then he took 200 cuttings and propagated them into vines. That turned out to be the easiest step in resurrecting Santa Cruz Island’s vineyard on Catalina.

The old zinfandel “has been the biggest problem,” Mr. Rusack said. It is a grape that traditionally loves the inland heat more than the coast’s cool temperatures. Then there is the cost to fly each year’s harvest from Catalina to Santa Ynez for processing.

Even in an industry full of wealthy patrons with caviar dreams, the ambitious project prompts some raised eyebrows among Mr. Rusack’s colleagues, who realize his enterprise will probably never turn a profit. He readily admits that he is often asked, “Why are you doing this?”

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“None of it is inexpensive,” said Mr. Rusack, who plans to build a winery and tasting room on the island and may one day expand the vineyard to 18 acres. “But the technologies out there today are making this a feasible, viable operation.”

Rusack Winery’s Santa Catalina Island Vineyards has among the highest overheads of any project in the industry, about $500 a bottle. “For them, it is really a labor of love,” Ms. Vermeer said during a recent visit to Santa Cruz Island, watching Mr. Rusack climb through the tangle of bushes to show off the willow tree grapevine. “It was driven more by a passion for the history of winemaking on the islands than really as a commercially profitable enterprise.”

Knowing that makes the retail price range ($65 for the zinfandel, $75 for the chard, $85 for the pinot) a bit easier to understand, as does the singular nature of the wine. The pinot and chardonnay feature the expected flavors of each varietal alongside what Mr. Rusack calls a “coastal freshness.” The zinfandel, while leaner than warmer-weather versions from the mainland, serves up notes of cinnamon and clove.

Not surprisingly, it has drawn the attention of not only wine enthusiasts, but also history buffs. “I can’t imagine this could happen anywhere else in the world,” said Marla Daily of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation, which preserves and promotes the Channel Islands’ cultural legacy through books, restoring buildings and collecting artifacts, like one of only two known bottles of original Santa Cruz Island wine.

Mr. Rusack and Mrs. Wrigley Rusack are happy to be the 21st-century caretakers of Mr. Caire’s dream. “It’s about great grapes,” Mr. Rusack said. “If we can’t grow great grapes there, it’s not going to be worth it for us.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2012, on Page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: An Island Vineyard, the Hard Way. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe